Confidence in your riding

First of all, remember that your worth as a person does not lie in how well your rides go. As riders, we often identify strongly with how we perform, and we tend to be very hard on ourselves.

Both self-esteem and self-confidence are tricky things, and the limited research on how to work on yourself effectively is honestly rather mixed. There are, however, a few things that tend to help with confidence and that seem to matter most for development over time, whatever the sport:

• Presence
• How you relate to your thoughts and feelings
• Process goals rather than outcome goals

So, aim to be present during the session, and find different tricks that help you do that.

Redefine what "a good" ride means, so that you work more on the process than the result. We often think we have to achieve certain things, such as performing a particular exercise in a particular way. A process goal, by contrast, might be to stay creative and dare to try different solutions to the problems you meet as the session goes on.

By that measure, a good ride is one where you work to stay present and actively try to solve whatever comes up by being creative, rather than performing perfect exercises, jumping a combination or anything similar.

And finally, trust in your own ability, or confidence, goes up and down for everyone. That is worth holding on to 💞